From Where I Sit: Season 2, Episode 9 With David Bramble, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, MCB Real Estate, Transcript

Tom McGee:

Welcome to From Where I Sit, the podcast where we explore the forces shaping America's built economy. I'm your host, Tom McGee, president and CEO of ICSC. In discussion with prominent leaders and innovators, we cut through the noise to explore the trends and innovations influencing the future of our communities.

It's my privilege to welcome today's guest to From Where I Sit. David Bramble is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of MCB Real Estate, a Baltimore-based firm behind some of the most ambitious mixed-use retail and urban development projects on the East Coast. David has been a driving force in re-imagining downtown Baltimore, including the high-profile redevelopment of the city's iconic Harborplace and landmark projects like Yard 56 a mixed-use campus in East Baltimore. A corporate and real estate attorney by training, David has spent more than 20 years in real estate investment, sourcing and capitalizing transactions and overseeing complex projects that aim to both deliver strong returns and strengthen communities. He's also the chairman of Lendistry, a fintech-enabled commercial lending company that has provided billions of dollars in capital to hundreds of thousands of small businesses and underserved communities across the country. David is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and he gives back through service on numerous boards, including John Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, the Ronald McDonald House and the Penn Institute for Urban Research, among others. He's widely seen as a visionary community builder who understands the power of real estate to transform not just properties, but entire neighborhoods and cities. David, welcome to the show.

David Bramble:

Thank you so much for having me, Tom.

Tom:

It's a pleasure to have this opportunity to speak to you, David, and you have become very much synonymous with the city of your childhood, your hometown where you currently and continue to live, Baltimore. And so let's start there. You have done so much for the city of Baltimore. You've done a lot in regards to investment in different real estate and different projects. And I mentioned some of them in the introduction, but let's just talk first about your personal connection to the city of Baltimore. What is it about Baltimore that is so special to you?

David:

Sure, it's funny you say that I've done a lot for Baltimore. I don't know about that, but I do know that Baltimore's done a lot for me. I love this town. It's really what I would say a small town with a big city attitude, a lot to give, a true underdog, and a massive diamond in the rough. I've grown up here, lived here basically my whole life. I actually live in the house I grew up in. The city's given a lot to me, always been very supportive, and I feel lucky to be a son of Baltimore.

Tom:

You are a son of Baltimore and it's a, you know, Baltimore is a great city that has been through a lot as many large industrial cities that went through transformation did. And you are, you're being modest. You have done a lot for Baltimore, but I'm sure your fellow Baltimore citizens are happy to hear you say that it's done a lot for you too. And you said you grew up in Baltimore. You live in the house you grew up in. Your parents were very active in the Baltimore community as well if my understanding is correct. Your father was a rector of the Episcopalian church there, and your mother was the founder of the Baltimore Times, or maybe together they founded the Baltimore Times. Is that correct?

David:

Wow, you really have done your research. Yes. My parents are pillars in my life and they started a small newspaper on the kitchen table. And then that became sort of the small business that, you know, put me and my sister through college. And we both went to law school and gave us a lot of opportunity. But yeah, and my parents own grocery stores and did all kinds of entrepreneurial stuff. There's a famous article that my dad has someplace where they called him “the entrepreneurial priest” because he was trying to put together sort of business opportunities in the community. I mean, going back, you know, this is going back 40, 50 years, which is a sight to see for sure.

Tom:

You had two great role models and I'm sure they were quite proud of you in the role that you've lived in life. Let's talk a little bit about now the role of real estate development in re-energizing, reinvigorating a community like Baltimore. And I know I read a quote at one point, and I don't, we're not going to do the quote justice, but there was a point where you weren't so sure about real estate developers earlier in your life and then you ended up becoming a real estate developer. You've had this transformation as it relates to your view of what you ended up doing in life. But let's talk about the fundamental of the role real estate development can have in kind of re-energizing a great city like Baltimore.

David:

So funny, you're right. There was a, when I was a kid in the eighties and all the movies that involve real estate were always some guy trying to throw old people out to build condos. You just had a, you know, real estate had this sort of seediness to it that you just didn't know what the, what's really going on there. And the funny thing is we all interact with real estate all the time, but you don't understand, the average person, I would say has no understanding of how it actually works other than their relationship to it as a tenant or as an owner, homeowner or whatever. So it's kind of interesting. So I always had a sort of negative view of it. My parents had done real estate deals, owned rental properties, and they owned the business with their, where they were the owner-occupied real estate. But to me, there was, you know, sort of always this sheen on it of something, you know, is there something inappropriate going on? And that's something we face today as developers, whenever we're approaching people. You know, there's this whole greedy developer sort of backdrop to every conversation that you have, which is so unfortunate because real estate development is really, really important to community revitalization because the built environment is how we all interact. It's all part of how we interact with the world and you need places to live. You need places to shop, you need places to eat. You need places to do all the things that we do.

And those things don't happen without real estate investment in real estate development. And so I, you know, one of my closest friends in the world convinced me to, that we should look at doing real estate deals. This is back when I was in law school and he'd learned about it through watching those, you know, late night infomercials. So there was no about, you could do real estate with no money down. I'm sure you remember those days from that's almost 25 years ago. He got into it and then he showed me, Hey, you could do this stuff and walked us through it. And we said, wow, this is really interesting. And we tried it and have come a long way since then, but definitely started out with a negative view on real estate. And I think that is true for many, many Americans who don't really understand the important role of real estate.

Tom:

It brings life to the community. I mean, to your point, it is where people gather and come together. And in the world today, for lots of reasons, that's never been more important, but particularly in the digital world, right? I mean, we thirst for that personal interaction that only the built environment can give to us. Now you mentioned a friend or a close friend of yours. Is that who you're in business with today? Is that Peter or who was that with?

David:

No. Well, Peter, yes, is also a very close friend of mine, but this is pre-MCB. These are guys, my fraternity brothers from back when I was an undergraduate and then in law school, one of whom is still my partner in our lending business, Lendistry, that you mentioned in introduction and still a partner at MCB. He’s not active in the day-to-day business. So yeah, we've been together a long time doing deals together, but Peter, my co-founder, the guy founded co-founded MCB with he and I are, he's like my brother from another mother. We've been friends and partners for many, many, many years. And I credit him with teaching me the retail side of the business, which I really didn't understand at all. When we started doing deals together, I remember once asking him, so you go to one of these shopping centers, how do you know what tenants belong here? And he said you ask shoppers and you figure out people know what to expect when they go to a certain shopping center. What goes with the grocery store, the daily use needs and how to think about merchandising. That's all stuff I learned from Peter.

Tom:

Now you are in the midst of a major project, Harborplace. For folks that aren't familiar with Baltimore, let's first start out with kind of the Inner Harbor and lay kind of the scene out of the role the Inner Harbor plays and kind of the Baltimore landscape. And then let's talk about Harborplace itself.

David:

Sure. So Baltimore, obviously town on the East Coast, sort of situated, nestled, I would say comfortably between Philadelphia, New York, Philadelphia to the North and D.C. to the South. And right in the heart of Baltimore, Baltimore is one of the few places that's blessed with a beautiful waterfront right in its central business district, known as the Inner Harbor. So back in the seventies, a mayor of Baltimore eventually became the governor, had an idea that we should redevelop that downtown waterfront and turn it from sort of a working waterfront into something that could be recreational and help revitalize the central business district. And it took another couple of mayors later for it to actually happen. And one of the most visionary developers this country has ever seen, a guy named James Rouse, founder of The Rouse Company, which eventually became part of a general growth, came up with this plan for what were called festival marketplaces. So what they essentially were was two level retail centers built directly on the water with lots of open places for activation that became the hub in the center of downtown Baltimore. What's so interesting about Harborplace when it first opened, it was so visionary. It really was the first time someone had taken a waterfront like this and done something like this. And back in the late eighties and early nineties, Harborplace used to have more visitors than Disney World. It was a true destination, both for the city and the region and was a major success and was repeated all over the place in multiple locations in Florida and Virginia. I it was all sort of modeled after this festival marketplace concept that you, if you're familiar with Faneuil Hall, that sort of concept. Unfortunately, over time, the project changed hands, the world changed and the thing fell into disrepair and eventually went down. You know, just became a disaster. COVID really was the last straw. Went into receivership and we acquired control of it a few years ago. And we've been going through a massive planning process to get it redeveloped. So very excited about it. MCB does business across the United States. We've done deals in 40 states. We develop a lot of stuff every year. But for me and Peter, given how important this project is to Baltimore and Peter and I both being from Baltimore, it's really a huge deal and a big burden and an honor to sort of been, you know, to be tapped to have to lead this redevelopment.

Tom:

For those folks that are from the East Coast, as I am, the Inner Harbor, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor is well known as a place that you go and you would do the things that you talked about, but there has been some recent challenges. So let's talk about Harborplace and kind of your vision for it. Look out into the future. Is it your goal to kind of replicate what you grew up with in the inner harbor or to build something different and new?

David:

It's completely new and different. So what we did, because it's such an iconic piece of dirt, it required a lot of community and public input. So we basically spent almost a year gathering all these concepts and ideas from people and really understanding what needed to be done to come up with the right development scheme. Now, you know, if you just listen to communities and community engagement and you build with just what you hear in the community engagement, a friend said to me the other day, you'd end up with a public library on top of bull riding and a senior housing project. And so it's not just to regurgitate what the community said, but to sort of incorporate that with, you know, what's practical and executable. So what we're talking about is completely re-imagining downtown Baltimore. So that would include taking down those old pavilions and coming back with a mixed-use project that includes multifamily, retail, office, and a lot of park space. That's kind of the idea, is like re-imagining the center of downtown Baltimore. You know, downtown Baltimore, like so many other downtowns post-COVID, has suffered from sort of the change, work from home. Okay, now we are coming back, but are we coming back to older product or are we looking for newer, sort of sexier kind of product and how to think about downtown Baltimore is sort of what we've been charged with and not by ourselves. I mean, there's an entire community of leaders in the public sector and private sector who are really focused on the completely re-imagining downtown. And I will say this to you about Baltimore in particular. I think ever since The Wire, which I'm sure you've seen or heard of at least, Baltimore's gotten a really, really bad rep and not all of it unearned, right? This is a city where there, you know, at a time, not today, but there was a time it was a very violent city, but it was also a really cool city with lots of cool things about it. But of course, you know, you get a really good HBO show and boom, that's who you are. And that reputation has plagued Baltimore for years. But as we go around as MCB and we're investing in doing deals all over the place, what we've realized is that Baltimore is one of the best opportunities on the East Coast. And this is how I think about it, right? Real estate 101 is you buy the worst house on the best block, right? In this instance, Baltimore is the worst house or really I would say the cheapest house on a mega block that goes from Washington, DC. all the way up to New York, potentially Boston, one of the most productive economic corridors in the world. If you ever heard me speak, you'll hear me talk about this. It really is an amazing opportunity, right? Because it's so small, right? It's a, it's a small area. There's lots of cheap real estate. You have waterfront. You have world-class institutions right in the city. Hopkins, Maryland, Mercy, other institutions. You have a port, which is drives huge demand right there in the city. You've got immediate access to rail right downtown as well as airports. It's basically got everything any city could want to build a comeback off of. What we needed to do is get the violence down and we literally have seen violent crime fall over 30% for the last couple of years. The folks in control and power here have really made that the hallmark of what they wanted to do. And now we are poised for an amazing economic comeback. And I'll just throw one more statistic out for you, which I think is really important. There's only 580,000 people roughly in the city limits of Baltimore, right? And some of those people are old and some are children and some are economically disadvantaged. Yet the GDP coming out of Baltimore is over $60 billion. That's really what you need to know. There's lots of room for economic growth in this town and it's time we took advantage of it. And I'm hoping others come to make investments and try to take advantage of it too.

Tom:

Well, I love the way that you kind of described it. I mean, it's location, location, location, right? I mean, that's, it's really the oldest lesson in real estate. And yeah, that whole I-95 corridor and Baltimore is right in the heart of it all. When you're trying to help lead big change and redevelopment in a city like Baltimore and doing something as large as what you're trying to do at Harborplace, you mentioned community engagement, engaging the community, having them buy into and support what your vision is, it's the key to success. How did you go about, you know, engaging the community as part of this?

David:

Well, this I will tell you is the community engagement process, the likes of which I hope to never do again in my life. I mean, we had big meetings, small meetings. We did this thing where you could come and have dinner with me. We had to, you know, it was crazy. We even had, this isn't a video, but I'd love to show it. They had signs on the sides of a city buses where it would literally say, come talk to us about the plan. I don't know a developer on earth that would literally put signs on buses saying, come fight with me about traffic and everything else. And what's interesting is, you know, we do a lot of development and normally in a development process, I have a plan in mind. I draw it, I figure it all out. And then I introduce it to the community. Then we start fighting about everything that, you know, people fight about before they realize it's going to be a big project traffic and schools and, you know, pollution and all the things that people fight about before they end up loving what you build. But this time we didn't do that. We did it backwards, actually, which is kind of crazy. We actually bought the property. Then we went to the community engagement process. And then once that was done, then we started to draw drawings. And that is only because of the nature of this project. And it's so important. It really is the heartbeat of our city. So we wanted people to feel really bought in to what we were doing and get excited about it. And I say this all the time. We'll build with it. If we can raise the capital, I'll build anything, right? But it won't make it, it won't survive. It can't be successful unless people love it and they use it. And so that's one of the major points you're trying to accomplish with community engagement.

Tom:

It's clear listening to you talk and the level of time that you put into making sure that you did engage the community. This is more than a real estate project to you. This is a real labor of love. I mean, this is a part of who you are as the son of Baltimore and your partner, Peter, also being a son of Baltimore. I can, I can tell that this is beyond just building a great real estate project.

David:

Only a lunatic, Tom, would take on something like this. You can put me in that category. Now what's so interesting is I mentioned this, this project was so important to the city. It actually was on the referendum. It was on the ballot that had to get approved what our development plans were. And so it was a, it is a huge heavy lift. And the crazy part is that's just the beginning. There's still a huge amount of public, I mean, it's a public private deal. So there's a lot of public capital that has to be raised as private capital. It's a ton of work, but honestly, you know, as I said, a thousand times, I, know, Peter and I need this deal like we need holes in our heads, but there really wasn't anybody with the scale and ambition to take it on that was willing to do the work. Then we did it. So still a long way to go. A lot of work to do and many things that could go wrong or could go right, but we are very excited about it. We have major support from the, all the way from the state house, all the way through city government. We're very excited about it.

Tom:

What's the timeline when you envision being able to have an official opening or launch?

David:

Well, we just got our site plan approval a few months ago. And if things go right, we're hoping to be able to start construction at the end of this year. Funnily enough though, this isn't even our biggest project in Maryland. Our largest project in Maryland is in Montgomery County, where we are undertaking a massive 280-acre redevelopment supported by Montgomery County's first large scale, well first ever, tax increment financing package. We're very excited about that too.

Tom:

And what's that project called David?

David:

That project is called Viva White Oak. It's a big mixed-use project, will include retail, multifamily, ultimately potentially some life sciences as that market returns and a lot of housing.

Tom:

You mentioned a couple things just in both talking about Harborplace and then talking about this new project and the state house, city hall, TIFs. Talk about the importance of, well, on multiple levels. I've heard you speak about this topic before. Some of the impediments to doing development and redevelopment is regulation, red tape, and it strikes me in a city like Baltimore, but other large cities across the United States that are in need of reinvestment or redevelopment that sometimes, the best intentions, but perhaps they've put up some roadblocks that aren't as helpful to the speed of redevelopment that would be warranted.

David:

I think that's a great, that's so important. And it falls into two categories. Sometimes they literally don't want to help. And that is super frustrating because you're saying, wait a minute, I'm here to invest this capital, to make this investment. Why don't you want to help me? That's one instance of it. And then the second instance, which is actually more sad, is they want to help, but they can't get out of their own way. And what we've done over time in this country and, you know, there's so many reasons and layers to it is we become a force for saying no and creating regulatory barriers and adding rules on top of rules on top of rules. And it's to the point where it's form over substance. There's all these rules, all these boxes to check. And the question is, do you want to get the project done? How important is the project? And what we have to figure out how to balance over time is, how do we create a set of rules that protects communities, protects the people who are going to use these things, protects the cities and the states and our government, but doesn't then ultimately keep us from growing. I mean, you know, there are, you know, I was talking to a group the other day on a project they're working out West. I won't throw them under the bus, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of inspections just to build some town homes and what you kind of have, well, we have to ask ourselves as a country, if we want to grow, if you want more stuff, we want affordable housing, we want more housing, all types, not just affordable. We do it. We have to get out of our own way. And the only way that's going to happen is with leadership, political leadership. You need political leaders who are going to say, I know there's a bunch of red tape and I don't want to cut any corners, but what we're going to do is sit with this developer, this investor and figure out how to get that deal done. Within the rules, how do we do it? And then the next question is then what rules ultimately? This is the sort of longer-term view. Do we need to change to make things happen faster? I spent a lot of time talking about NIMBYism in particular. It is one of the worst things that we have in America because it does everything it can to stop people from changing whatever it is. And I give the example of myself, right? So I live in a rough part of town in Baltimore with a lot of beautiful houses, but they're old and, you know, the area's pretty economically disadvantaged. So some of the houses are vacant and someone wanted to buy a house and convert a portion of the house to an apartment and then, you know, to live in and then rent out to other units to make it economical. And when I saw the zoning posting, I got angry and I picked up the phone and I call my city councilman and I'm like what are they doing? Then midway in the call, said, wait, what am I doing? This makes all the sense in the world. Of course this person should be able to do this. And then I realized so much of what we're dealing with is emotional. People are emotional about changes that you want to make to someplace that they live, that they perceive they own, which they do. And so they fight you and it slows everything down because the politicians, if they're not brave enough, this needs to happen. And oftentimes, you know, in this, you get this, the talking to the community. My next question is who's the community? You know, if I go out and talk to 10 people, they'll have 10 different things that they want, but the community tends to be the person who's the loudest and who's going to call the city council person the most times to try to get them to stop whatever it is that you're doing. And until we get over that in America, it's going to be difficult for us to fix our housing crisis, to add more commercial where there should be commercial and to do all the things that we want to do, particularly in these older mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states.

Tom:

Yeah, change is hard and it is scary for folks and that's where leadership has to come into play. You mentioned kind of these older cities, mid-Atlantic and a lot of older cities on the East Coast, but also in the Midwest too. There's a number of those types of cities as well that Baltimore's high population is probably a million people somewhere in that area. A million two and it had regulations associated with the city of a million two and now its population has shrunk, probably added more regulations since then as opposed to reducing the regulations to stimulate more population growth. So to your point, I think it's not just about adding new laws, it's also about taking things off the books.

David:

It's adding new laws, it's taking things off. And the other part to it is, okay, if you're going to add a new law, fine, but then you need to add the resources to effectuate the law efficiently. So there's nothing worse than when the, you know, a politician gets a great idea about, okay, no more building in case there's a spotted owl. But did anybody ask, do we even have spotted owls in this area? Or how do you find out? Or how do you move the project along? And, and I think that we need to have the mindset of yes. How do I get to yes? Not how do I get to, how do I stop you? Which is where I think in a lot of these older cities, the mindset is how do I prevent you from doing this? And then the other concept that's so problematic is this whole push for, you know, what I call is these people who conflate development and growth with gentrification slash displacement. It's such a ridiculous argument in distressed communities that quite frankly need more income to be successful. The question is not, are you going to gentrify the neighborhood? Because you do need, if you want a better neighborhood, you need more people with income. The question is, are the people who live there going to benefit? It's not whether wealthy people come. Who cares if wealthy people come? That's great. The question is, do other people get to benefit from, you know, the growth and change in those markets? And the problem is as soon as you propose a development and we develop it in wealthy areas and in disadvantaged areas, you get into this ridiculous debate about gentrification. And it just drives me insane because look, it's hard as heck to do deals anywhere. Right. If you go into a distressed neighborhood, it's only harder. So the last thing we want to do is chase capital away. I want to invite capital. But we want that capital to have a conversation with the neighborhood, with the communities to understand what they need and try to make it so that those communities are benefiting from that capital infusion, not just seeing their, you know, their property taken away by others. So I think there's a hard conversation to be had in America about how we do this, or we won't see growth and development in the places where we need them most.

Tom:

I think I've heard you use the term double bottom line before where it's rate of return, but also community benefit, right? And if you can, if you can grow, you grow the pie for everyone, that's to everybody's best interest. David, you have broad perspective around real estate in general. And we've talked a lot about Baltimore, but you've, you do transactions and operate, and I think in something like 30 states or somewhere close to that and across sectors, retail, multifamily, industrial. Given the scope of your view of real estate and geography, your perspective on the state of commercial real estate today.

David:

So yeah, I think I heard today we're in 40 states, so we're pretty—

Tom:

Okay, 40. I shortchanged you 10 states. Sorry about that.

David:

Yeah, you shortchanged me. But I actually didn't, I had to ask that earlier today in terms of asset classes, the retail, multi, industrial, and we also have a healthcare division. So those are sort of our primary buckets and we invest across the risk spectrum. So it's everything from sort of core plus stuff all the way through heavy lifts, opportunistic deals like what you just described, including ground-up development, which is obviously one of the riskiest investment strategies of all. What's interesting is what we're seeing is that a real resurgence in retail, right? For years, even though MCB's portfolio is roughly almost always 30% to 40%-ish retail, retail was a persona non grata. It was very difficult to get investors to be interested in retail, to get folks to focus on retail opportunities, even to find young people who are interested in coming into the retail side of the business, either on asset management, leasing, acquisitions, whatever it was, retail has really atrophied. But now what we see is a huge resurgence in retail. Retail seems to be what everybody wants. So when I go meet with my investors and asset managers and pension clients and so forth, they all say, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice industrial. I've done enough industrial deals. Where are the retail opportunities? Which is shocking to me because I remember when you said retail and all you got was a dial tone. So we're feeling really good about retail, particularly grocery-anchored retail. We also see opportunities in power and strip as well on the multifamily side. It's challenging. It's a challenging market. There's a lot of, it's difficult to get deals done and that's faced, that bid ask spread continues to be a pretty big challenge. And on the industrial side, we've got to see some of the supply get soaked up, I think, before we start to see the kind of growth we were seeing, you know, over the last decade. In a funny way, I laugh because there was a time when you could not raise institutional capital for industrial. And when we went to do industrial deals, they laughed us out of the room. Then it changed to multifamily retail. So it's so, it's such a weird, you know, understanding how capital flows and what's going to sort of be the darling asset class of the next cycle is, is always an interesting exercise.

Tom:

Thank you for that. You and I, before the podcast, we're talking a little bit of just kind of the challenges of doing ground-up development now and the costs associated with that. There's a lot of demand for retail. There's not a lot of supply of new retail coming on the market. I don't see that changing in a big way anytime soon. I mean, just the cost of development, the cost of labor. I just can't imagine there being a development boom coming in the U.S. anytime soon around retail. Do you see it differently?

David:

No, I think you're 100% right. As I was saying is we've actually delivered a new grocery-anchored shopping center almost every year for the past several years, but every one of them has a story. There was a subsidy attached to it. There was a sale of land to a home builder or some sort of special financing. You know, the math just doesn't work. As we just talked about, you can't afford not all the time, but almost all the time, a deal doesn't work. You know, the ground-up development is just too expensive. You need huge rents, which the retailers sometimes can't afford to pay and attracting both the capital and the tenants to a deal that makes any sense is virtually impossible. So I don't see a boom. And then you add on top of it, what we just talked about, the regulatory environment. Earlier today, I was at a ribbon cutting for a grocery-anchored shopping center we just delivered in Maryland. And it was five years, five years, six years. We just finished another one 10 years from when we bought the property to when we could get our first red check because of the regulatory environment, the capital environment, the expense of building these things. So I don't see a development boom, but I do see a huge amount of capital flow coming into existing retail assets, which is going to drive values. But I don't see the development boom.

Tom:

Yeah. And I think the demand for retail space by retailers has never been higher either because retailers have learned to use their, you know, stores for multiple purposes outside of just traditional shopping.

I want to just transition a little bit to another passion of yours and that's small business lending, Lendistry, a fintech-enabled company. I know you've through it have provided hundreds of small business owners with capital. Talk a little bit about that. There's a little bit of a through line there between some of the things you do at MCB and what you're doing there in regards to serving underserved communities as well.

David:

Yeah, 100%. And thanks for bringing that up. So small business is huge, right? I mentioned that that's what paid for my parents being able to start a small business is what paid for, you know, basically four Ivy League educations in my household, right? It's been my sister and me and people underestimate the value of small business, small business investing and building equity. So you asked me about my house. So that house that I grew up in, actually bought it from my parents and then they took the proceeds they got from that sale and they gave it back to me. And those were my, that was my initial investment capital to do, to do deals. Right. And that was because they built that equity in the house. And it's one of the great, awesome things about America is the ability to my parents are immigrants to come here with nothing, to get a really good education. And then be able to have a house which you could put up for equity that could then be turned around and invested in other things. I mean, it's huge. And the small business thing grows out of that. So my partner Everett, he started that company, had a vision because all the small banks are sort of getting consolidated and turning into big banks. And once a bank is big, if you need a small business loan, there's only two ways to qualify. If you have a great credit score and you can qualify for a credit card. They'll give you a loan, but if you need a million dollars, good luck, right? At a big bank, they can't afford to do the work to lend you a million dollars. So what Everett wanted to do was use technology to figure out a way he could process small loans and provide small business loans very quickly. So we started that business in 2015. Everett and myself and one other guy, we made a loan to a carpet company for $15,000. We each put in five grand. As of today, I think he’s done about $10 billion in loans and grants. It's all tech-enabled. The technology is amazing. These whiz kids he's got working for him. They run circles around me. I sometimes have trouble getting into my email. All the underwriting, you know, kind of underwriting evaluation, all tech-enabled.

It is unbelievable what they're able to do with the tech and what it's doing in terms of democratizing access. Most recently, Visa just put a hundred million dollars into Lendistry specifically to advance small business, its small business lending strategies. Everett's raised billions and invested billions in small businesses all over the country. So really, and it's really important because today's small business, is tomorrow's medium business. And it may never get to a big business, but if it creates equity and helps someone do the next thing or helps the next generation do something, that's what America's all about. And providing access to capital is, you know, one of the key things. And it used to be you walked onto your local bank, the bank president knew your mom and dad, and he helped you get a deal done. That's gone now for the most part. So you do need platforms like this that are able to quickly aggregate the data, make decisions in a financially efficient way, and then provide capital quickly. So that's the story of Lendistry and it is, it really is an amazing story.

Tom:

It's a brilliant idea and your point is well taken. Consolidation in the banking industry and to your point, for a variety of reasons, banks are going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and that's going to put more pressure on kind of community banking and industries filling that void. You're also involved in a couple other, or a number of other boards, including Ronald McDonald House and John Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and Urban Research at Penn Institute.

What drives you to get, I mean, you are very, your cup runneth over with things that you're involved with. How do you keep it all together? I mean, just the number of balls that you're juggling. We just talked about this major project you're doing at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore that's going to be transformational for the city that you love. But yet you have lots of other projects you're working on, plus all these other things that are outside of real estate. How do you manage your time?

David:

It ain't easy, but I will tell you, it's not me. I'm the face of it. Peter and I are the face of it, but we have an amazing team. I mean, that's really what makes all this work. And there's 160 plus people here at MCB operating across our platforms, including our development platform, really seasoned executives and teammates here that allow us to execute. It's not, if you think that I am going through the technical review of every site plan on all the projects we have, you'd be sorely mistaken. We rely on one of the best teams in the business to execute these projects. And what I would say is the reason we get these people is because of the breadth of what we do. You know, if you come here and you work at MCB, you have the chance to see all kinds of things from the simplest things like, you know, building a Starbucks to the most complex things like massive land use redevelopment that we do. And projects that we deliver, you know, we delivered a half a billion dollars of new projects in 2025. And we have a huge amount to start at the end of 2026. So a lot more deliveries coming in ‘28, ‘29 and ‘30. And that's what people get excited about is seeing it all coming together. And this group of executives and leadership that we have is what really makes it all work. I wish it was all me, but it's not. And it gives me great satisfaction to see the team that we built here, how conscientious they are, how excellent they are, how much they reflect the integrity that Peter and I want to see in how we conduct business. It's actually kind of cool. Kudos to my team because they allow me to serve on a bunch of boards and talk about a bunch of stuff while people are in the trenches, getting site plans approved, getting leases sign and getting deals closed.

Tom:

Well, it does take a team for sure. And it sounds like you got a wonderful team in it, but it also takes leadership. So congratulations to you. And, and it also takes vision. You have a vision for a city that you love in Baltimore that you're leaning into and trying to make it better and lead it into the next century. So thank you for that. Before we close, any final comments about any of the topics we talked about?

David:

No, I just want to thank you for having me. I think this is great. And I got to tell you, I'm, I'm glad ICSC is doing this. There is a real resurgence in retail. And I think it's incumbent upon us to really be focused on and finding that next generation of leaders in the retail field across all the different pieces that touch retail, because there is a gap. A lot of people got out of retail. We need to spend time focusing on getting people up to speed on what is honestly one of the most complicated asset classes there is. You know, I love industrial, it's one of my favorite asset classes, particularly because you don't face the basis creep risk and something like retail, but nothing's as fun as putting together the pieces of an amazing merchandising plan and then seeing it built and then seeing how it impacts a community that is all. And that's one of the benefits of retail. And I'm hoping that we can encourage more people to get involved in retail, get excited about it and support the growth and re-emergence of our sector.

Tom:

Well, thank you for that. That's a big mission of ICSC and our ICSC Foundation is heavily focused upon, you know, bringing students into retail and, you've been supportive of that. So thank you for that. And thank you for the commentary around not just what you're doing in Baltimore, but also there's lessons there that can be applied to other American cities around the country that really need to kind of reinvent themselves and reenergize and reinvigorate for the next century that, you know, maybe went through a deindustrialization stage, but now there's another stage that is available to them. And we need leaders like you to lead the charge in other great cities as well. So thank you for that. And thank you for being on today's podcast and thank you to all of our listeners.

David:

Tom, thank you so much for having me and for talking about the stuff that we care so much here about at MCB. Thank you.

Tom:

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